Best for
- Repositories where every developer invented their own workflow
- Teams growing past the stage where everyone just knows
- Histories that cannot answer 'what shipped when, and why?'
What you give it
- Your repository, team size, and release style (continuous, versioned, both)
What you get back
- The conventions decided and written: branching model, naming, commit format, merge strategy — each with its reason
- Enforcement wired where possible: protected branches, required checks, commit linting, template files
- The history contract: what a reader can rely on finding — and the practices that would break it, banned by name
How it works
- Fits the model to the team's actual release style — trunk-based with short branches for continuous shippers, release branches only where versioned support genuinely demands them.
- Decides each convention with its reason written, because conventions without whys erode on the first deadline.
- Enforces by machine wherever the platform allows: protections, required checks, linted messages — the convention that depends on memory is already failing.
- Defines the history contract: the guarantees (main always buildable, every merge traceable to review) that make the log a usable record.
Example
You: Five developers, five workflows, and a main branch that broke twice this month. Set us straight.
Result: The decisions: short-lived branches named by type and ticket, one trunk, squash-merge with the PR as the story unit (reasoning written: your team reviews by PR, so history should read by PR), commit summaries in imperative under 72 characters with the convention linted, main protected behind the two required checks, force-push banned everywhere shared. All enforced by repository settings and hooks where tooling reaches; the two unenforcables (commit body quality, branch freshness) made review-checklist lines. Main has not broken since, and 'what shipped Tuesday?' is now one command.
Limits — please read
- Conventions bind going forward; history rewriting of the past is neither needed nor wise — the contract starts now.
- Tooling enforcement varies by platform; the unenforceable remainder lands in review checklists, honestly labelled.
- Workflow religion wars (merge vs rebase) are settled by fit to your review style, with the tie-break written.